History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
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The rhetoric of choice: Segregation, desegregation, and charter schools
- 11-23-2011
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Opinion by Ansley T. Erickson/Dissent Magazine (Subscription required)
Ansley T. Erickson is an Assistant Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Over the last decade, talk of choice in education has reached an unprecedented pitch, and the talk has brought forth extensive dollars and human energy. Advocates for school choice, which has become a pseudonym for charter school reform, claim that changing how individual students end up at one school rather than another will contribute to significantly expanded access to quality education. Forty years ago, many American communities began to reorganize student assignment on a massive scale. Court-ordered busing for desegregation radically altered how students were assigned to schools and on what criteria. It is worth looking at that historical moment to understand the nature and limitations of the present debate. Although desegregation may seem a remnant of a distant era, reinterpreting the history of desegregation raises important cautions for the current interest in charter schools. (more...)
Also: Teachers College Press Room (for link to full article)
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